I recently presented a paper titled “Learning from Masters: Ethics and Cosmology in Zarathustra and Hazrat Inayat Khan” to a conference on Zoroastrianism and Sufism. Zarathustra, known to the Greeks as Zoroaster, founded the religion that bears his name. Hazrat Inayat Khan is the founder of what is now the Inayati Order of Sufism. In both we find a kind of virtue ethics, a concern for building admirable character rather than obeying moral rules or calculating the consequences of our actions. And in both we find intriguing hints of a cosmology of pantheistic panypsychism.

I have argued that the concept of moral duty is, in a sense, bogus. Moral duties, rules and obligations do not exist independently of us in the same way that physical and mathematical realities do. We certainly have moral intuitions, that is, feelings and judgments that some types of actions are morally forbidden, others are allowed and others are mandatory. But these intuitions are socially constructed. Moral rules are independent of individual human beings in that they come from the culture that an individual lives in or was raised in. But they are not independent of all human beings in the ways that physical things and (arguably) mathematical entities are.

Once you recognize the peculiar irreality of such intuitions—that they have no physically objective basis in fact, but do have an undeniable influence on our assessments of types of behavior—you can rationally choose which moral intuitions to give assent to and obey, and you can choose which ones to ignore or repurpose. You can choose to adopt certain courses of action as a general rule and then harness the power of moral intuition to reinforce them. You can, in effect, choose your duties.

Here is an example. I know a person who engages in environmental struggle. At the moment he is trying to put a halt to a real estate development that would destroy many beautiful trees and would cause harm to nearby neighborhoods. It has been a long slog with a few victories and many defeats. At times he becomes quite discouraged. But he continues, partly because he is stubborn and partly because he feels a sense of duty or obligation to do so. He is not a moral realist. He recognizes that morality is socially constructed and that he is free ignore it. But he assents to the duty under which he finds himself.

He does so because he sees it as his dharma, a concept from Hinduism. One of the meanings of the Sanskrit word “dharma” is duty. This concept of duty, however, is not a narrow moral one, not a list of right things to do and wrong things to avoid. Rather it has a sense of acting in accord with the fundamental order of the universe, with what holds everything together. The concept includes duties, rights and laws, but also virtuous conduct in general.(1) It assumes, of course, that the universe has a fundamental order that has some relevance to human conduct.

This person chooses to continue in the struggle because he prefers to be the kind of person who assents to such duty. He adheres to the goodness ethic, to work for the good in all things.(2) Preventing harm to his neighborhood is an obvious good, and so is saving trees and wildlife habitat, especially in the face of global warming. He chooses to undertake a task that he has the skills to do and that increases his skills with practice. Enhancing useful skills is also an obvious good. He wants to have admirable character. He wants not just to be admired, but to be admirable, that is, to have character that people have good reasons to admire. Perhaps, he hopes, others will become motivated to work for the good as well, and such motivation would increase goodness. And he does it in order to strengthen his ability to persist in the good despite painful feelings of discouragement, anger and fear.

He wants to become the kind of person who does good things as an expression of who he is rather than one who merely obeys a set of rules. The importance of good character is that not only can others rely on a person of such character but that the person can rely on himself or herself as well. In this case he does not have to question continually whether to persist in the often unpleasant struggle, but can spend his energy actually doing so. He is virtuous in an Aristotelian sense: he has skills (arete); he has enough practical wisdom to put them to good use (phronesis); and in so doing he experiences a kind of fulfillment (eudaimonia).(3)

He is a bit of an existentialist in that he chooses to create himself as the person he wishes to be. And he is a bit of a mystic in that he believes that the universe does, in fact, have a fundamental order. It has an inner unity with a drive toward increased richness of satisfaction. He finds himself an integral part of the living being that is the cosmos as a whole. If he did not follow his dharma he would not be fully himself, and both he and the universe would be poorer.

Duty in the sense of societal restrictions is to be questioned. Duty as dharma, as acting in harmony with the will of the Whole, is to be discerned and embraced.

Notes

(1) Wikipedia, “Dharma.”

(2) Meacham, How To Be An Excellent Human, pp. 14-17, and Meacham, “The Goodness Ethic.”

Author and self-proclaimed metaphysical speculator(1) Bernardo Kastrup attempts to solve the mind-body problem by embracing philosophical idealism. His basic insight is sound, but the way he defends it is flawed, and some details of his theory don’t support his aim. This essay shows how, with a little tweaking, his insight can be salvaged. But be warned: it gets a little dense.

First, some background. The mind-body problem, recently renamed the “hard problem”(2), is the problem of how the ability to be conscious (mind) is related to entirely unconscious matter (body).(3) Historically there have been two broad categories of answers, dualism and monism. Dualism asserts that mind and body are two different types of substances. Mind has the ability to be conscious but lacks spatial extension, and body has spatial extension but lacks the ability to be conscious.(4) Dualism, although favored by some theologians, is unsatisfactory because it fails to explain how an immaterial substance can have any interaction with or effect on a material substance, and vice versa. Monism, on the other hand, asserts that there is basically only one type of substance. One of its variants, materialism, says that the basic substance is matter. Another, idealism, says that the basic substance is mind.

Materialism is unsatisfactory as a metaphysics because it can’t explain how unconscious matter gives rise to experience. Historically the alternative to materialism—at least for those who prefer monism over dualism—has been idealism. But idealism is equally unsatisfactory, as I shall endeavor to show. (I discuss a third alternative, dual-aspect monism, below.)

Idealism is not, in its philosophical form, the espousal of high or noble principles such as truth, justice, loyalty, compassion, and the like. Philosophical idealism would better be called “idea-ism,” as it is the doctrine that everything is basically ideas, that reality at its core is mental. It has a long and varied history in western philosophy from Plato onward to Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, the German idealists culminating in Hegel and a number of now-forgotten British and American idealists who followed Hegel.(5) It has an even longer history in Indian philosophy, going back to the Upanishads and onward through Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta and, more recently, the teachings of gurus such as Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo and others.(6) I bring up the Indian tradition because it seems to be the inspiration for Kastrup’s idealism.

That inspiration would be fine, except that in a recent paper Kastrup attempts to go beyond mystical intuition to present a logically rigorous defense of idealism, and in fact a particular type of idealism, absolute idealism, the claim that being is ultimately comprehensible as an all-inclusive whole.(7) Kastrup wants to demonstrate that, as he puts it, “there is only universal consciousness.”(8) His aim is to show “how the most parsimonious possible ontology can be derived, through rigorous steps of reasoning, from canonical empirical facts available to observation.”[p. 2] Unfortunately neither his facts nor his reasoning holds up to scrutiny. Here are just a few examples.

Kastrup starts by listing nine “empirical facts accessible to anyone through simple observation.”[p. 2] These are to function as premises for his argument. Most are not controversial, but some are. Let’s take his Fact 7:

Fact 7: a nervous system has the same essential nature — that is, it belongs to the same ontological class — as the rest of the physical universe. After all, nervous systems are physical systems. They are composed of the same types of basic subatomic particles that make up the universe as a whole.[p. 2]

This is an assumption, not a fact. There are actually two problems here. The first is that the composition of nervous systems is not accessible through simple observation. Scientists and medical researchers investigating nervous systems reliably observe certain images through microscopes and certain readings on rather complex instruments. It is a plausible theory, based on these observations, that nervous systems are composed of subatomic particles; and it is indeed the most plausible theory so far. But it is nevertheless a theory and certainly not accessible through simple observation. Similarly, the composition of the universe as a whole is a theory, not a fact. Even worse, the assumption that the universe, including nervous systems and the farthest stars, is the same throughout is just that, an assumption. It underlies the scientific method but is not demonstrated by that method. So Kastrup’s alleged fact, although plausible, is hardly an empirical one accessible to anyone through simple observation.

His reasoning is even more suspect. Take his Inference 1, which is based on Facts 1 and 2.

Fact 1: there is subjective experience. This is the primary and incontrovertible datum of existence.[p. 2]

Fact 2: from Fact 1, we know that there is that which experiences, since experience entails an experiencer. Notice that I am not, at least for now, passing any judgment or making any assumption about the fundamental nature or boundaries of that which experiences. … For ease of reference, I will henceforth refer to ‘That Which Experiences’ simply as ‘TWE.'[p. 2]

Inference 1: the most parsimonious ontological underpinning for Facts 1 and 2 is that experiences are patterns of excitation of TWE. This avoids the need to postulate two different ontological classes for TWE and experiences, respectively. As excitations of TWE, experiences aren’t distinct from it in exactly the same way that ripples aren’t distinct from water, or that a dance isn’t distinct from the dancer. … There is nothing to experience but TWE ‘in motion.’ Ripples, dances and experiences are merely patterns of excitation of water, dancers and TWE, respectively.[p. 3]

Inference 1 has some problems.

The phrase “subjective experience” in Fact 1 is redundant, as all experience is subjective, accessible directly only by the one who is experiencing. I suppose this is just a quibble, but one would expect a bit more precision from a person who claims to make a rigorous argument. More seriously, it can be argued that the primary datum of existence is not that there is experience but that there is a world. Only after some reflection do we realize that it is we who experience the world.

Fact 2 is not something accessible through simple observation, it is an analytical truth. This is also just a quibble, though. The interesting part of Fact 2 is that Kastrup says he makes no assumptions about the nature of that which experiences (TWE).

But in Inference 1 he does make an assumption about TWE. He says it is something excitable. It can be in motion. It is a sort of medium that contains or is composed of patterns of excitation.

No doubt what we experience is constantly in motion and much of it appears in patterns. But to claim that what experiences all that motion is itself in motion is not an inference; it is just an assertion. Kastrup claims that the assertion is based on ontological parsimony, but gives no evidence for that claim. In fact, what he does here is to assume what he wants to prove. His goal is ontological parsimony, so he assumes ontological parsimony to justify the inference to his goal of ontological parsimony. This is not a sound logical move.

Kastrup says that TWE is “an indisputable empirical fact … as opposed to abstractions of thought.”[p. 11] But it is not an empirical fact. Even on his own terms (“experience entails an experiencer”) it is something inferred. Given that his inference is faulty, TWE is just an assertion, and far from indisputable.

His Inference 2, which is based on Fact 4, has problems as well.

Fact 4: there is at least a partial correlation between measurable electrochemical activity in a person’s nervous system and the person’s private experiences.[p. 2]

Inference 2: from Fact 4, we know that a nervous system is sentient. … Somehow, the activity of these systems is accompanied by inner experience. One possibility is that there is something about the particular structure or function of nervous systems that constitutes sentience. However, it is impossible to conceive — even in principle — of how or why any particular structural or functional arrangement of physical elements would constitute sentience …. This is a well-known problem in neuroscience and philosophy of mind, often referred to as the ‘hard problem of consciousness.’ … It remains conceivable that physical arrangements could still modulate experience, without constituting it, if one postulates some form of dualism. But even if this hypothesis turns out to be coherent, it would still leave That Which Experiences entirely unexplained, since TWE would be that which is modulated (Inference 1). From all this we must conclude that TWE is uncaused, irreducible. It simply is. Technically, we say that TWE is an ontological primitive.[p. 3]

How does he get from the assertion that nerve activity and experience are correlated to the conclusion that TWE is uncaused and irreducible? That is quite a leap. Let’s analyze the argument in detail.

He asserts that “from Fact 4, we know that a nervous system is sentient.” Already there is a problem, because it is not the nervous system that is sentient but the person or organism whose nervous system it is.

He then adds an additional premise, one not stated in his list of facts, that it is impossible to conceive how arrangements of physical stuff could result in sentience. But he gives no evidence for the assertion except citing an authority or two. As a matter of fact, it is quite controversial, and there is a large body of literature devoted to arguments pro and con.(9)

He alludes to dualist explanations of the mind-body problem and claims that they might explain how physical stuff could modulate experience but also claims that TWE would be unexplained. His justification for the latter assertion is his Inference 1, which we have just found to be faulty.

He concludes that since TWE is unexplained both under monistic materialism and under dualism, it must be an uncaused, irreducible ontological primitive.

All three of his premises are flawed, two being entirely unjustified. Hence, the conclusion does not follow. Once again Kastrup assumes in his premises what he wants to prove. He wants to say that the only explanation for TWE is monistic idealism, but assumes without justification that no other explanations suffice. He begs the question, committing the fallacy of citing as a premise what is in dispute.

OK, that’s enough. There are many more nonsequiturs, unexamined premises and the like. Poking holes in this guy’s argument is like shooting fish in a barrel. The conclusion to be drawn, however, is not necessarily that Kastrup’s metaphysics is wrong. It may be simply that logical derivation is a poor way to ground or justify metaphysics.

Kastrup is trying to get at something important. Even if his derivation is flawed there may be something worthwhile in his conclusion, so let’s start there and see if it makes sense. Here is a summary of his thesis:

I argue for a coherent idealist ontology [which] can be summarized as follows: there is only universal consciousness. We, as well as all other living creatures, are but dissociated alters [i.e. alter egos] of universal consciousness, surrounded like islands by the ocean of its mentation. The inanimate universe we see around us is the extrinsic view of thoughts and emotions in universal consciousness. The living creatures we share the world with are the extrinsic views of other dissociated alters of universal consciousness. A physical world independent of consciousness is a mistaken intellectual abstraction.[p. 1]

The statement that there is only universal consciousness puts Kastrup firmly in the absolute idealist camp. He explains reality in terms of ideas—thoughts and emotions—in universal consciousness. By saying “there is only,” he asserts a kind of monism, saying that all that exists is something he calls “universal consciousness.” By that phrase he means TWE, that which experiences. He says “‘Consciousness’ is the ordinary English word that best fits what I mean by TWE.”[p. 11]

(As an aside, I think “consciousness” is actually a terrible word for TWE. It has too many other meanings, ranging from merely being awake to being conscious of things in an ordinary sort of way to being a conscious self. The term “consciousness” as a synonym for TWE conceived of as the ground of all being is misleading. Its meaning is certainly far from just being able to detect your surroundings well enough to navigate around. In another place Kastrup uses the term “mind-at-large,” which is much better.)

So Kastrup is a monist. Now, monism can be of two kinds, which we might call, following the analytic philosophers, Type monism and Token monism. The distinction between a type and its tokens is an ontological one between a general sort of thing and its particular concrete instances. The sentence “A rose is a rose is a rose” contains eight separate tokens, words as individual collections of letters, but only three types, words as things that convey meaning. The word “rose” is one type that appears three times in the sentence; that is, there are three tokens of it.(10) Type monism would assert that although there are lots of different things in the world, they are all made of the same type of stuff or all fit into the same ontological category. Token Monism would assert that, appearances to the contrary, there is actually only one thing.

Materialism is a Type monism. No materialist asserts that there is only one material thing; instead, all things are taken to be of the same type, namely physical matter. Some idealisms, notably that of Bishop Berkeley, are Type monisms, asserting that there are many things, each of which is of the same type, something perceived by the mind via the senses. Berkeley says that such sensible qualities cannot exist apart from being perceived.(11) Kastrup, however, is a Token monist. In another work he says “consciousness is unitary and essentially undivided. … I call this unitary consciousness ‘mind-at-large’. … the universe as a whole has subjective inner life.”(12)

Kastrup calls his work a defense of nondualism.(13) He is a modern apologist for the ancient Indian philosophy Advaita Vedanta. “Advaita” means not two, or non-dual; and “Vedanta” literally means the end of the Vedas. The Vedas are ancient religious texts of India, and their end is the Upanishads, philosophical texts based on them.(14) Advaita Vedanta is a nondualist interpretation of certain themes in the Upanishads, the main point of which is

a consideration of the relation between Brahman, the Holy Power spoken of in the Upanishads … as sustaining and/or informing the cosmos, and the self, or atman. Some Upanishadic texts … assert that in some sense Brahman and atman are one.(15)

Here are some representative passages that make that assertion:

“This whole universe is Brahman.”(16)

“This finest essence,– the whole universe has it as its Self: That is the Real: That is the Self: That you are!”(17)

“This Self is Brahman indeed.”(18)

And that’s what Kastrup is getting at when he says there is only the mind-at-large. The whole universe, Brahman, is a self, atman. The universe as a whole, having a subjective inner life, is like a living being. Everything in the universe is something contained in the mind-at-large. All things, nonliving and living, inanimate and animate, are things that the mind-at-large thinks of or feels; in other words, is conscious of.

Kastrup explains the difference between what is not living and what is living in an interesting way. Both are in the mind-at-large, but in different ways. Inanimate things are ideas in this being’s mind and living organisms such as human beings are dissociated alter egos of this being, rather like split personalities of a person suffering from dissociative identity disorder.[p. 4] Each alter ego perceives the world, but only from its own point of view rather than that of the mind-at-large. Each alter ego is like a little piece of the cosmic ego, mind-at-large, which perceives the whole universe.

What each alter ego perceives as separately existing things and as living beings are extrinsic views either of mental activities within the mind-at-large or of other alter egos (which I presume are also mental activities within the mind-at-large). By “extrinsic” Kastrup appears to mean exterior. The mind-at-large thinks of nonliving things such as rocks. The rocks are ideas in the mind-at-large; they are interior or intrinsic to that mind. What we alter egos see as rocks is the exterior, the extrinsic view, of mind-at-large’s ideas of rocks. Living beings are dissociated entities that have an interior or intrinsic view, their own view of the world, and an appearance to other alter egos, an exterior or extrinsic view. That is Kastrup’s ontology in a nutshell, explaining how everything exists in the mind-at-large.

But consider this ontology carefully. Some entities, the inanimate ones, have only an exterior. The mind-at-large thinks of them—i.e., they are objects that the mind-at-large is conscious of—but they themselves are not conscious of anything. We alter egos are conscious of them, but they are in no way conscious of us. Other entities, the living ones, have both an exterior and an interior. They are objects that the mind-at-large is conscious of, and they themselves are conscious of things. We alter egos are conscious of them, and they are or can be conscious of us. In effect Kastrup posits two categories of things, bodies with no mind and bodies with mind. Despite being dressed up in monistic terms, his ontology is dualist!

If we want a truly monist ontology, we must look elsewhere. Fortunately, there is a better one. It is both Type and Token monist, it accounts for the undeniable plurality that we find in the world, and it is true to the unitary mystical insight of the Upanishads. That ontology is based on the process metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead.

Whitehead’s ontology is one of process. The fundamental units of reality, in his view, are occasions, not inert particles. Occasions are quite tiny. He wrote at a time when quantum mechanics was being developed, and no doubt the mysterious behavior of reality at the subatomic level informed his thinking. Entities submicroscopically small cannot be described as material as we generally think of it. Quantum-level entities do not interact like billiard balls; instead, they seem to have a quasi-existence in a field of mere potentiality until they are detected; then they become actual. The interaction between them and someone or something else that detects them is essential to their existence. Reality at that level is relational and dynamic.

Whitehead seeks categories of explanation that can apply both to the quantum level of reality and to the world revealed by our unaided senses. In our everyday world it is undeniable that, unless we are asleep or sedated, we are aware of our surroundings and remember our past. So Whitehead posits that subatomic actual occasions are, in a way, aware of their surroundings and of their own past. Whitehead calls them “drops of experience, complex and interdependent”(19) and “occasions of experience.”(20) They are examples of what Galen Strawson calls “micropsychism.”(21) We could call Whitehead’s metaphysics a process panpsychism.

One of the objections to panpsychism is that it seems obvious that some things, those that are not alive, have no sentience whatsoever. So how can we say that everything has a psyche? The answer is that in nonliving things the sentience is confined to the constituent actual occasions, and is not found in aggregations of them. The sentience of living things, in contrast, is a function of their complex and dynamic form, which is more than mere aggregation.

Just as subatomic particles combine to form all the objects of our world, so do actual occasions combine into nonliving and living things. In nonliving things the combinations are simple and stable; in living things they are complex and dynamic. The constituent material of nonliving things does not change over time unless impacted from without. The mentality of nonliving things remains isolated at the subatomic level. Tables, chairs and chunks of rock are certainly not sentient, and process panpsychism does not assert that they are. But living things have a unity of form over time as their constituent material changes. They are not mere aggregations. That complex unity of form over time is accompanied by a complex mentality. The primordial experiences of the actual occasions comprising living things, such as plants, animals and human beings, bind together and reinforce each other, giving birth to a higher-level coherence of experience.

Whitehead’s metaphysics can be seen as a form of dual-aspect monism, but with a twist. Dual-aspect monism, also known as neutral monism, says there is only one type of substance, which has both physical and mental properties.(22) Whitehead agrees, but says reality is better conceived as process than as substance. Every instance of reality, that is, every actual occasion, has both a physical and mental aspect, the physical being how it is detected or experienced by other occasions and the mental being how the world and its own internality appears to itself. The difference between Whitehead’s ontology and dual-aspect monism is that in his view the underlying substrate that has both physical and mental aspects or properties is process, not substance.

There is much more to Whiteheads’ process ontology, but that is enough for now. Let’s return to Kastrup. He is not a big fan of panpsychism because it is only a Type monism and he wants a Token monism. He objects to an ontology that postulates as ontological ultimates a slew of abstract subatomic particles.[p. 11], and the notion that they might in some sense be conscious does not impress him. But there is a way to extend process panpsychism that might be more congenial.

The clue is in a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 13, verses 1 and 2. Krishna, The God, speaks to Arjuna, a human:

1 This body is called the ‘field’, and he who knows it is called the ‘knower of the field’ ….
2 Know that I am the ‘knower of the field’ in every field.(23)

This passage echoes the earlier Brihadaranyaka Upanishad:

The man who possesses this knowledge becomes the Self of all contingent beings.(24)

What these texts suggest is that TWE, to use Kastrup’s term, that which experiences, is the same in every experiencer. Not just the same type of thing, but the very same thing (although the term “thing” is misleading, as it is not a thing but that which experiences things). Brahman is the atman (self) that experiences its world in every being. This is a slightly different way to understand what Kastrup is getting at.

Kastrup is after unity. The unity of all that exists can be understood from the inside, as it were. We can say that the mind-at-large is that which is conscious and active in everything, in every event. What appears to be many from the outside, Kastrup’s extrinsic view, is in fact the manifestation of one underlying reality. The mind of each of us is the same as the mind-at-large of all of reality. As I like to put it, there is one universal interiority, which incorporates the interiority of all the separate constituents of reality into one unity of experience, one coherence of interiority.(25)

The difference between this view and Kastrup’s is subtle but important. We’ve seen that Kastrup, although claiming monism, actually ends up with a dualism: in his view some bodies have mind and some don’t. We can ameliorate Kastrup’s dualism by combining it with process panpsychism, which says that everything has mind, just as everything has body. Everything is composed of occasions of experience, each of which has the dual aspects of interiority (mind) and exteriority (body). And we combine process panpsychism with Advaita Vedanta to conclude that all these occasions of experience are united in one mentality, the mind-at-large. Instead of saying that the mind-at-large thinks of everything so that everything exists within it, we can say that mind-at-large is everything. It is broken into bits, as it were; and the bits, being both mind and body, perceive each other. Each one experiences its world; and its world is the extrinsic view of all the others, which experience their world. The mind-at-large as self (atman) perceives all there is through the senses of each of the bits. And the mind-at-large as body is entirely perceived by those bits that comprise itself.

In other words, to use Kastrup’s terminology, every actual occasion is an alter ego of mind-at-large. If we use the term “God” to mean TWE and say that the mind-at-large is the mind of God, we can say that process panpsychism is process pantheism.(26)

You’ll notice that I have not gotten to process monism and process pantheism by reasoning from premises to conclusions. Doing so is a fruitless task, as we can see from Kastrup’s attempt. Instead, I have joined some insights and ideas that together form a coherent system of metaphysics. As I have noted elsewhere, we evaluate metaphysics differently from how we evaluate empirical science and logical reasoning. By finding a way to relieve Kastrup of incipient dualism, I believe I have come up with something superior. I hope Kastrup himself would agree.

(26) This is a variant of Whitehead’s notion of God. Whitehead has a place for God in his ontology, and his conception is similar this one, but not the same. A comparison of the two is a topic for another time however.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, says the bard, but a concept wouldn’t. Take the term “consciousness.” Usually taken to mean the capacity to be aware of one’s surroundings, it can mean anything from the mere state of being unsedated to the ground of all being. If we want to avoid ambiguity and promote mutual understanding, we need to get clear on what we mean by the term. In this essay I focus on the most grandiose of its meanings, the ground of all being.

Deepak Chopra, a prominent New Age author and speaker, says

“consciousness creates reality”(1)

and

Consciousness … is not just a human attribute. Existing outside space and time, it was “there” “before” those two words had any meaning. In essence, space and time are conceptual artifacts that sprang from primordial consciousness.(2)

Without addressing the metaphysical claim, it should be clear at least that the term “consciousness” in this context is misleading. Its meaning is certainly far from just being able to detect your surroundings well enough to navigate around. As this primordial consciousness is alleged to precede any distinction between being conscious and what one is conscious of, it would be less confusing to call it something else, perhaps “primordial being” or “primordial reality.”

But there are a number of other terms we could use as well. Here are three:

Brahman

Tao

Zat

These terms – and there may be more; this list is illustrative only, not exhaustive – come from various mystical traditions. “Brahman” is from the Upanishads, ancient Indian philosophical texts, and it means supreme existence or absolute reality.(3) “Tao” is a Chinese word meaning the primordial essence or fundamental nature of the Universe.(4) “Zat” is a Sufi term meaning the unmanifested.(5)

Does that help? Is “unmanifested essence of absolute reality” any better than “primordial being” as a substitute for “consciousness”? What could these terms mean? To answer, we must consider what meaning is.

The great German logician Gottlob Frege distinguished two aspects of meaning, which he called reference (Bedeutung in German) and sense (Sinn). A term’s reference is what it refers to, denotes or points out. A term’s sense is the way it is presented. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains it this way:

One of his primary examples … involves the expressions “the morning star” and “the evening star”. Both of these expressions refer to the planet Venus, yet they obviously denote Venus in virtue of different properties that it has. Thus, Frege claims that these two expressions have the same reference but different senses. The reference of an expression is the actual thing corresponding to it, in the case of “the morning star”, the reference is the planet Venus itself. The sense of an expression, however, is the “mode of presentation” or cognitive content associated with the expression in virtue of which the reference is picked out.(6)

The terms in question here – “primordial reality,” “Brahman,” “Tao,” “Zat” – all have the same reference; they all denote the same thing. (Except what they denote is not a thing. We’ll get to that shortly. But linguistically the terms all function the same way, as names.) Their senses are different, however.

To understand the senses we do have to address metaphysics. Let’s consider just one of the terms, “Zat,” with which perhaps you are not familiar. The Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan says the following:

According to Sufi tenets the two aspects of the supreme Being are termed Zat and Sifat, the Knower and the Known. … Zat being only one in its existence, cannot be called by more than one name, which is Allah; and Sifat, being manifold in four different involutions, has numerous names….

Zat projects Sifat from its own self and absorbs it within itself. It is a rule of philosophy that the negative cannot lose its negativeness by projecting the positive from itself…. The positive has no independent existence, yet it is real because projected from the real, and it may not be regarded as an illusion. Human ignorance persists in considering Zat to be separate from Sifat, and Sifat independent of Zat.(7)

Within manifest reality, the reality we all live in, there are two poles: the knower and the known, that which is conscious and the objects of which it is conscious. Zat, the knower, is called negative because in any moment of experience it is absent from Sifat, all the objects of experience. The experiencer is not any of what is experienced; it is not found in experience; it is, as it were, a nothingness. (That is the Sufi’s assertion. You will need to examine your own experience to determine whether or in what way it is true.)

But recall that “Zat” also denotes the unmanifest. According to this cosmology, Sifat, all that is manifest, emanates from the unmanifest, Zat, at the beginning of time and will return to the unmanifest at the end. We are in the midst of a grand cosmic cycle, rather like that posited by the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. That theory says that about 15 billion years ago the universe started expanding from an unimaginably small point and that at some point in the future it will collapse back into a single point. Unlike the Zat-Sifat theory, which makes no measurable predictions, the Big Bang theory does predict certain observations; and those observations have been confirmed.(8) Until further evidence is found it is at least reasonable to suppose that the universe oscillates between being fully collapsed and fully expanded, and that we find ourselves at some temporal point within that cycle.

The Big Bang theory makes no reference, however, to a conscious observer; it describes only the physical world that is observed. The Zaf-Sifat theory, on the other hand, explicitly includes an observer, Zat as knower. Not stated in the brief excerpt given above, but included in the world view of the Sufi, is the assertion that the point of view which is conscious within each one of us, which we may refer to as a knower, is in some way the same as a universal or cosmic knower. Ralph Waldo Emerson called it the “Over-Soul.”(9) Zat as knower of Sifat is not just a feature of the individual but part of the fundamental structure of reality.

So what is the relationship between Zat as unmanifest and Zat as knower? That Zat as knower is a feature of the world we live in leads thinkers such as Chopra to believe that the term “consciousness” is appropriate for it. Because “consciousness” has many meanings, I think it more suitable to avoid the term and say something like “transcendental Self” or “transcendental Ego” or “Over-Soul” instead. But even those terms would not apply to a state in which nothing is manifest.

Physicist Stephen Hawking says we can say nothing about the physical characteristics of the unmanifest state, the state “before” the big bang:

Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at the Big Bang. Events before the Big Bang, are simply not defined, because there’s no way one could measure what happened at them.(10)

Similarly, the Zat-Sifat theory says that we can say nothing about how it would be to experience the unmanifest state. It would be a state of complete unity. There would be no separation between knower and known, between the conscious subject and the object of which the subject is conscious. It is impossible to imagine such a state, because we can imagine only various objects presented to us, not the absence of all objects. The closest we can come is to imagine sheer undifferentiated quality, sameness, suchness, it-is-what-it-is-ness, what C.S. Peirce called Firstness.(11) The unmanifest state would be neither consciousness nor an object of consciousness, neither witness nor what is witnessed, neither mind nor matter.

As such, it would be completely useless. Speculation about it is what the Buddha called a question that does not edify.(12) Regardless of what the unmanifest state might or might not be, what matters is the state of manifestation that we live in here and now.

What’s not useless are the senses, as Frege calls them, of the various terms taken as referring to the Over-Soul that regards manifest reality. To think of Zat as the knower of the entirety of Sifat – or of Brahman as identical with self or soul, or of Tao as animating the flow of nature, which I have not discussed – suggests something like a personality, an agent. Agency, say the mystics, lies at the core of the reality we live in. And it is not at all useless to try to find out something about that agent and even to enter into a deliberate relationship with it.

The agent at the core of reality has been called by many names. We may call it “Allah,” as the Sufi suggests, or “Krishna” or “Quan Yin” or “Ahura Mazda” or “Wakan Tanka” or “Y-H-V-H” or “God” or “the Higher Self” or many other names. Just don’t call it “consciousness.”

A friend of mine used to startle people by asking “So, what’s it like being you?” Best answers:

Fun!” (five year-old boy)

“Better than being you.” (graduate student, now director of corporate strategy at a large enterprise)

“I don’t know, I have no basis for comparison.” (university professor)

Humorous as these answers may be, only the last one is philosophically accurate. Ever since Nagel’s influential essay “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” the phrase “what it is like” has been used to refer to the subjective character of being conscious. An influential article on Phenomenology, for instance, contains the phrase “what it is like to have sensations of various kinds.”(1) The famous Zombie Argument against the reducibility of the mental to the physical asserts “There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.”(2) The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy tells us, “An experience or other mental entity is ‘phenomenally conscious’ just in case there is something it is like for one to have it.”(3) Other examples abound. But it is a very misleading phrase, because strictly speaking one’s subjectivity is not like anything!

In order for the phrase “what it is like” to make sense, it has to refer to something we can contrast to something else.(4) We can ask what it is like to swim in Barton Springs and answer by comparing swimming in Barton Springs to swimming in Deep Eddy. But to ask what it is like to be conscious or to have sensations makes no sense, because there is nothing to which we can contrast being conscious or having sensations. Each of us has his or her own experience alone. Nobody else has direct access to it, nor have we direct access to anyone else’s, so we can’t compare them and can’t truly assert similarity or difference. We can compare our present experience to memories of our own past experience or anticipations of our future experience. But our experience is not like anything, in the way, for instance, that the flavor of a tangelo is a bit like that of a tangerine but juicier and a bit like that of a grapefruit but sweeter.

Nagel himself recognized the difficulty. He says “The analogical form of the English expression ‘what it is like’ is misleading. It does not mean ‘what (in our experience) it resembles’, but rather ‘how it is for the subject himself’.”(5) Nagel’s essay would have been better titled “How It Is To Be A Bat.”

In everyday speech it may be quite OK to use the phrase “what it is like” to refer to our subjectivity, because it is an idiom that we generally understand. But even so, it lacks a certain panache. Bob Dylan did not sing “What is it like? / To be on your own / Like a rolling stone.”

In philosophical speech, however, such idiomatic language is best avoided. It leads to sophomoric conundrums like how I can tell whether my experience of redness is the same as yours. (Answer: I can’t, and it doesn’t matter.) Let’s quit using the expression “what it is like” to speak of subjectivity and speak instead of how it is or how it feels to be conscious. The issue concerns more than just arcane discussions in philosophy of mind. It is a crucial question in the age-old and perennially new question of how we can know ourselves. Wisdom is not served by verbal confusion.

Ever since Kant we have recognized that we know reality only through our experience of it. We have no privileged epistemic access to the Dingen An Sich, the things in themselves. (In fact the presumption that there are many things is just that, a presumption.) All we have is phenomena, how reality appears to us; all we have is our experience. What is of interest, then, is how to make sense of that experience.

Along these lines, Tommy Kelly, a friend in the philosophy club and quite a bright and interesting fellow, has an intriguing comment on my blog post “Is Science a Religion?” In that essay I claim that there is a parallel between scientific observation and meditative experience. Tommy wants to take it a step further and say there is really no difference at all between the two. Here is what he writes:

Reading your article reminded me of a question I’ve had for a while but for which as yet I’ve not been able to figure out an answer. You say:

…religion at its best bears some resemblance to science. The phenomena it concerns are not public in the same way that the subject matter of the physical sciences is. But they are subject to verification. There exist, for instance, quite detailed sets of instructions for meditative practices that produce altered experiential states. …You can think of spiritual practice as a sort of experiment. You have to do the experiment to get the results, just as you do in the physical sciences. Unlike the physical sciences, the results are largely private, not public; but they are not unverifiable.

I agree with most of that, but I’m suspicious of this part: “The phenomena it concerns are not public in the same way that the subject matter of the physical sciences is.” Consider the following two experiments:

Experiment One: Look through a telescope oriented in a particular way.

Result: You will experience a set of phenomena (sights, sounds, feelings, etc.) commonly known as “the rings of Saturn.” Note that these phenomena—your observations—are private. As you peer through the telescope you and only you will “see Saturn.” Nevertheless, someone else can repeat the experiment; and we are confident they will experience their own private observations that, according to our shared language game, are considered the same as yours.

Experiment Two: Kneel down with your back upright then close your eyes and make mental notes—”rising…rising…rising” and “falling…falling…falling”—corresponding with the movement of your abdomen as you breathe.

Result: You will experience a set of phenomena (sights, sounds, feelings, etc.) commonly known as “the first samatha jhana.”(1) (Of course I understate the amount of such practice that is needed, but the point remains regardless.) Note that these phenomena—your observations—are private. As you perform the noting exercise, you and only you will “enter jhana.” Nevertheless, someone else can repeat the experiment; and we are confident they will experience their own private observations that, according to our shared language game, are considered the same as yours.

Generalizing, then, it seems that *all* observations are private. In that case, the private versus public difference doesn’t seem to exist after all. So in what way is science different from religion-at-its-best?

To Tommy I respond as follows:

Yes, all observations are private, but what they are observations of is a matter of interpretation. Some are usefully taken to be public, and others, private. Science treats the former, and religion treats the latter.

The difference between seeing the rings of Saturn and experiencing the first samatha jhana is that all those who see the rings of Saturn consensually agree that what is seen is a set of objects existing independently of anyone’s seeing them; but those who experience the first samatha jhana consensually agree that what is experienced is not one set of objects existing independently of anyone’s experience of it, but rather a state that is experienced only by the experiencer. In other words, there are as many states as there are observers, and each observer experiences his or her own state of jhana, not anyone else’s. (In addition, you can quantify what is seen when you see the rings of Saturn but you cannot (I think) quantify what is experienced when you experience the first samatha jhana.)

We all consensually agree that what scientific observations are of is a reality independent of us. I suppose that we can’t unequivocally prove that it is so, but such an interpretation makes very good sense of our experience, and it works to help us get around in the world and make intellectual sense of it.

What meditators experience, we consensually agree, is private to each meditator. I suppose that we can’t unequivocally prove that it is so, but such an interpretation makes very good sense of our experience, and it works to help us get around in the world and make intellectual sense of it.

So the difference between science and religion-at-its-best is found not in single observations, each of which is indeed private, but in the sense we make of multiple observations by multiple people. It is reasonable to take the objects of science as public. It is reasonable to take the objects of religious experience as private, or at least not public in the same way.

William James, the great American Pragmatist, puts it this way:

Ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become [believable] just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience, to summarize them and get about among them by conceptual short-cuts …. Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor; is [believable] for just so much, [believable] in so far forth, [believable] instrumentally.(2)

James offers epistemological criteria for what warrants our belief. The idea that the rings of Saturn are public objects links our observations satisfactorily and saves intellectual labor compared to the idea that everyone seeing them observes something different. Similarly, the idea that the first samatha jhana is private to each meditator links our observations satisfactorily and saves intellectual labor compared to the idea that all the meditators perceive the same thing.

James took these epistemological criteria a step further into the metaphysical theory that all that exists is experience.(3) We need not go that far to understand that it is a good idea to examine our experience closely because our experience is all we have. Philosophically, the discipline of Phenomenology founded by Edmund Husserl is a useful method.(4) Practically, the disciplines of meditation, particularly Buddhist Vipassana, are helpful.(5) However we do it, investigating our own experience is a step toward knowing ourselves, the essence of wisdom.

—

Notes
(1) “Samatha” is a form of Buddhist meditation. “Jhana” is a Buddhist term meaning absorption. The first samatha jhana is the first of a series of states of meditative absorption. See The Dharma Overground, “Samatha jhanas.”

(2) James, “What Pragmatism Means,” p. 49. I substitute “believable” for “true” in this passage, as I think James, in his zeal, misuses the latter term.

I venture to guess that most people are moral realists. That is, they think that rules and principles of morality—that stealing and lying are wrong, for instance—actually exist in some form independently of what anybody thinks of them. By contrast moral anti-realists deny the independent reality of moral rules and principles. They say that moral rules are only social conventions. As evidence the anti-realists point to the fact that different cultures have different moral norms.

An extreme example is honor killing.(1) In some cultures it is considered morally obligatory to kill a woman who has brought disgrace to her family by having sex outside of marriage. This is so even if she was raped; she should not have put herself in a situation where that could happen to her. People in most western cultures consider honor killing hideously wrong. But there is no objective way to decide which one it is, right or wrong, obligatory or forbidden.

If one person says the weather is too hot, and another person says it’s not, there is no way to adjudicate who is right. But they can both look at a thermometer and determine exactly what the temperature is. They can come to objective agreement about the temperature and then recognize that the comfort level of that temperature may be different for different people.

Not so with morality. If you are convinced that honor killing is right, you can admit that other people don’t think so, but you’ll still think you are right and they are wrong. And they will think the same of you. The problem with morality is that there is no objective way to tell which view is correct. That conundrum leads moral anti-realists to say that neither one is correct. There is no moral fact of the matter because morals do not exist in the same way that physical reality exists.

Moral realism makes for a number of bad consequences: morality makes us angry; it promotes hypocrisy; it encourages arrogance; it is arbitrary, because there is no final justification for saying anything is right or wrong; it is imprudent, leading us to do things that have obviously bad consequences; it makes us intransigent, fueling endless strife; and it leads philosophers to waste time on silly puzzles.(2) Moral anti-realism avoids all these ill effects. As I argue elsewhere, we would be much better off speaking in terms of good and bad, the language, roughly speaking, of prudence, rather than in terms of right and wrong, the language of morality.

How would this work in practice? Let’s take a contemporary issue, whether to eat meat or not. Moralistic vegetarians say that killing animals—or at least big farm animals such as cows and pigs—for our benefit is wrong. Being a vegetarian is “the right thing to do” says food writer James McWilliams. It is a “basic moral truth” that we should not kill farm animals in order to eat them.(3) Doing so violates their “right to live.”(4) That’s because, it is alleged, farm animals are “sentient beings.”(5) They are, as philosopher and animal rights advocate Tom Regan says, subjects of a life.(6)

The argument, in abbreviated form, is this: Killing sentient beings needlessly is wrong. Big farm animals are sentient beings. Killing them so we can eat them is needless because there are other ways we can get nourished. Therefore killing big farm animals so we can eat them is wrong.

Now, there are a number of ways we could attack this argument. One is to deny that cows and pigs are sentient beings in the sense of subjects of their lives. They certainly do not pass the mirror test for self-awareness.(7) Another is to deny that we can get fully nourished without eating meat.(8) But the most fundamental objection is the anti-realist one: to deny the first premise. It is not the case that killing sentient beings is wrong, because objective rightness and wrongness do not exist.

As I have argued elsewhere morality is socially constructed or, in technical terms, intersubjectively constituted. It’s not just a matter of convention; we don’t all sit down and agree to abide by certain moral rules. And we do have a sense that moral rules are independent of what any one person thinks they are. But that independence is not the independence of physical reality, which would be there whether we were or not. It is the independence of a set of norms within a community or society. Everybody agrees (more or less) on what they are, everybody treats them the same way and everybody acts as if they are real. So, for members of such a community they are real.

Once you realize the socially constructed nature of morality, you get to choose whether or not to buy into it or not. There is some truth to the Existentialist assertion that you are what you choose. As Sartre says, “[A human being] … is what he wills …. [He] is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.”(9) Whether you should obey the purported moral injunction against eating meat is not predefined. You define yourself as one who does or does not take it seriously.

But what if you do think it makes sense to avoid eating meat and want others to do so as well? What is a concerned moral anti-realist vegetarian to do?

The answer is to appeal to self-interest. You can appeal to the benefits of vegetarianism without guilt-tripping others (which doesn’t work well anyway). Here are some useful arguments that avoid moralistic “shouldhoods”.(10)

You’ll feel better and be healthier if you don’t eat meat. There is evidence pro and con on this one, but you can certainly advise people to alter their diet and see how they feel. Then they will have a sound basis for deciding.

Raising meat contributes to global warming because animals emit methane, a greenhouse gas. If you want to reduce global warming, don’t eat meat, because the less demand there is for meat, the fewer animals will be raised for food. This argument appeals to the quite sensible desire not to live in a world of extreme temperature and weather events.

Meat is an inefficient way of feeding people. We can feed a lot more people on the plants that animals eat than on the animals themselves. If you want to alleviate people’s hunger, don’t eat meat. This argument appeals to our sense of compassion for others, not as a moral duty, but as a way of alleviating our own suffering.

Many ways of killing animals entail their suffering. If you want to minimize suffering, then don’t eat meat. This argument encourages us to enlarge the circle of beings we take as significantly like us. Again, doing so is not a moral duty. But it enables us to experience more compassion and empathy, which are rewarding in their own right.

Perhaps you can think of other non-moralistic arguments. Appeals to morality are intractable and only create conflict. Appeals to enlightened self-interest are far more likely to result in harmony and in lasting change.

—

Notes

(1) This example is taken from Rosenberg, “Can Moral Disputes Be Resolved?”

(2) Marks, Ethics Without Morals, chapter 4.

(3) McWilliams, The Modern Savage, p. 6.

(4) Ibid., p. 9.

(5) Ibid., p. 6

(6) Animalethics.org, “Subject of a Life.”

(7) Science Daily, “Mirror test.”

(8) See, for instance, Smil, “Should Humans Eat Meat?”

(9) The phrase is from psychologist Alfred Ellis. See Ellis and Dryden, The Practice of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, p 206.

Do we see reality as it is? The fact that we are subject to perceptual illusion leads some thinkers to assert that we don’t. Instead, we see (or taste or feel, etc.) an illusion concocted by our brains. Donald Hoffman, Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California at Irvine and a respected researcher, is a popularizer of this view. A couple of recent videos, one on the Science Channel,(1) and another on TED,(2) are entertaining expositions of his thesis that our experience is misleading.

The figure on the left contains various grey patches. Two of them, corresponding to A and B in the figure on the right, appear to be different but are actually identical greys; a photometer would find them to be the same. Hoffman takes this as evidence that the cognitive aspect of our perception (he calls it “visual intelligence”) constructs the greys that we perceive.(3)

The idea that the world we encounter in our everyday experience is not the real world is not new. Ancient Indian philosophy speaks of the world as Maya, illusion, which conceals the true nature of reality.(4) Plato likens us to prisoners in a cave and likens the things we experience to shadows thrown on a wall. The philosopher is one who breaks his (or her) chains and ventures out into the real world to perceive reality truly.(5) Kant said that things in themselves are unknowable; all we know through our senses is the world of phenomena.(6)

What Hoffman brings to the table is not only a wealth of experimental evidence but a plausible account of how we got this way. His thesis is that our perceptual apparatus is wired evolutionarily, not to perceive reality accurately, but to enhance our genetic fitness. What counts is not how well we see reality as it is, but how well what we see helped our ancestors stay alive long enough to mate and have children. And what we see is shaped by “tricks and hacks,” as he says(7), not accuracy.

This account is not merely a “just-so” story.(8) Hoffman has conducted some mathematically rigorous computer simulations that show that creatures that employ strategies tuned to utility outcompete those that employ strategies tuned to objective reality.

Here is a simplified version. You construct a series of simulated habitats, each of which has some quantity of food and water. Then you construct two creatures that will look at the habitats and choose one to occupy. One creature, the truth seeker, looks at the exact quantities of both food and water; it has an accurate perception of reality. Another creature, the simple hacker, just looks for the greatest amount of food and ignores water; it uses a trick, not a fully accurate perception. The truth seeker takes more time and energy to gather its information and make a choice than the simple hacker. The simulation repeatedly pits the two creatures against each other in a variety of habitats. It turns out that the simple hacker occupies the better habitats more quickly than the truth seeker. In other words, it outcompetes the truth seeker. Accurate perception of reality turns out not to be an optimal strategy.(9)

Hoffman and his colleagues have performed many far more complex simulations, pitting not just these two strategies against each other but yet another as well. The truth seeker embodies what they call a naive realist strategy; its perceptions fully match what really exists. The simple hacker embodies a critical realist strategy; its perceptions are limited but still reflect some truth about reality. Both are homomorphic to reality; that is, both have the same shape or structure as reality. The critical realist strategy is just less finely grained than the naive realist one. Hoffman proposes yet a third strategy, which he calls the interface strategy, in which perceptions are not homomorphic to reality. In the simulations, the interface strategy outperforms both of the others. Hoffman and his colleagues conclude that “natural selection does not always favor naive realism or critical realism. … In many scenarios only the interface strategy survives.”(10) In other words, it is entirely possible that our perceptions bear no resemblance to reality at all! (To be clear, Hoffman does not say that the interface strategy always or necessarily wins, only that it can. And that a lot more research is needed.)

So the claim, supported by some evidence, is that it is possible that our perceptions bear no resemblance to reality at all. But Hoffman, in his popular lecture, goes further. He claims that it is not just a possibility but a fact that they bear no resemblance. He says, “There’s something that exists when you don’t look, but it’s not spacetime and physical objects.”(11) And “When I have a perceptual experience that I describe as a red tomato, I am interacting with reality, but that reality is not a red tomato and is nothing like a red tomato.”(12)

Hoffman goes too far here. How can he possibly know that reality bears no resemblance to our perceptions? By his own admission, we have no contact with reality—what Kant calls the Ding an sich, the thing in itself—at all. So there is no way to make a comparison.

What we can compare is not experience with reality, but some experiences with others. Consider the visual illusion of patches of grey above. The reason we think our perception is illusory is that it doesn’t agree with what a photometer tells us. But we know what a photometer tells us only through our experience!

Try this: print this page and then cut out the two patches in question and place them side by side. In that position they will look the same. If you have a photometer, measure them, both in context and side by side. In all cases they will measure the same. You can go to the website of Edward A. Adelson, the originator of the illusion, to see more evidence for their sameness.(13)

There is a reason that we consider our experience of the photometer and our experience of the patches viewed side by side more veridical than our experience of the patches in context. It is simpler and more coherent to assume that the grey colors stay the same and our perception varies by context rather than that the colors actually change when the context changes. And the former assumption leads us to make more successful predictions.

What we take as physical reality is what Willard Van Orman Quine calls a “cultural posit.” His account is picturesque but informative:

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries—not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. Let me interject that for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.(14)

Similarly, the myth of reality as homomorphic, for the most part, to our experience is believable just because it works so well for us. Optical illusions reveal, not flaws in our perception, but how well our visual system is adapted to reality under standard conditions.(15)

(To be fair, Hoffman does have a more complete argument for his view of the relationship between experience and reality, which he calls “Conscious Realism,”(16) but a full discussion of that is a topic for another time.)

Buddhists advise us to act so as to benefit all sentient beings. To understand this advice we need to know what a sentient being is. (We also need to know what benefiting such a being would consist in, but that is a topic for another time.)

Wikipedia says

“Sentient beings” conventionally refers to the mass of living things subject to illusion, suffering, and rebirth (Samsara). Less frequently, “sentient beings” as a class broadly encompasses all beings possessing consciousness, including Buddhas and Bodhisattvas [who are not subject to illusion and suffering, etc.].(1)

Initially we can say that a sentient being is one that is alive and is conscious of its environment. This definition excludes robots and other machines that detect changes in their environment and respond to them but, we assume, are not conscious. But what is it to be conscious?

In a pre-theoretical way we all know what it is to be conscious, because we are all conscious a good bit of the time. We have what is called “knowledge by acquaintance”(2) of being conscious. But attempts to define consciousness have been legion, and so far there is little agreement. That’s because our language is inadequate to the task. Language is well-suited for talking about the objective world we all inhabit, but not our subjective experience.

By “objective” I mean what is out in the public world that we can all see or hear or touch or sense in some way. If I tell you it is raining outside you can go look and see for yourself whether I am right. By “subjective” I mean what is private to each one of us. Such things as our thoughts and feelings, the particular shades of colors we see and the particular qualities of sounds that we hear are subjective. If I tell you I am thinking of rain you have no way to tell whether I really am or not.

So a sentient being is one that has a subjective, private point of view. The world appears in a particular way to a sentient being, a way that is not accessible to anybody else.

What distinguishes a sentient being from a non-sentient being is that we can imagine being the former but not the latter. Children do this all the time, playing at being cowboys or princesses or any number of other roles that they see adults acting out. First-person literature puts us in the shoes, so to speak, of another person, allowing us to fantasize how it would feel to be that person and how the world would appear to him or her. We can, if we choose, take another person’s point of view.

Obviously it is a lot easier to imagine being another person than being something non-human such as, for instance, a bat(3) or a dolphin(4), both of which rely on sensory modalities far different from ours. But we can at least imagine that the world appears in some way to such beings, even if we cannot very well imagine the specifics. We infer from their behavior that they perceive their world and take an interest in it, that they have beliefs and desires and initiate actions as we do. We can, in a similar way, imagine that worms, insects, even single-celled amoebae are sentient.

Imagining being another sentient being allows us to care about that being. We can sympathetically understand their suffering and their joy. We have compassion for them because we know, or think we know, how it is to be that being. Just as we would like to alleviate our own suffering, we want to alleviate theirs as well.

One might reasonably ask if having compassion is really the best way to alleviate our own suffering. Why open ourselves to the possibility of feeling what another being feels? That just gives us more suffering! Perhaps we would be better advised to close ourselves off and not care about others at all.

Well, closing ourselves off is certainly one strategy for reducing our suffering, just as cultivating compassion is another. But those who have tried both report that the latter works a lot better. Your life is richer and far more fulfilling when you enlarge it. The closed-off path leads to loneliness, despair and pain. The path of compassion leads to connection, hope and delight. And, if the Buddhists are to be believed, it leads ultimately to the perfect peace of Nirvana as well.(5)

There’s only one way you can find out for sure. I suspect we have all closed ourselves off to one degree or another. To find out if compassion works better, we’ll just have to try being compassionate and see for ourselves.

At a recent conference at the University of Texas at Austin Jeff McMahan, a distinguished professor of ethics and the author of quite a number of works on the subject, revealed a shortcoming in much of contemporary ethical thought. The context was discussion of charitable giving and its ethical obligations, and the professor posed a conundrum. There appear to be scenarios, he said, in which one is not obligated to do an act that would produce some good, a praiseworthy act—doing so would be supererogatory, above and beyond the call of duty—but once one has engaged in the act, one is obligated to maximize the good one does. Here are some examples:

A wealthy person dies and leaves in her will an extraordinary amount of money to her dog. She is not obligated to leave her money to any entity, but once she has decided to give it to somebody or something, it seems morally wrong to give it to a dog rather than to a charity that would benefit human beings. (This is a real case, by the way. The benefactress was Leona Helmsley, and her will made quite a stir in the news a few years ago.)

You are confronted with a burning building inside of which are a human child and a bird in a cage. It would be quite dangerous to enter the building, and you are under no obligation to do so. But if you do, and you save the bird instead of the child, people would be justified in blaming you for not saving the child.

You find a person trapped under some wreckage. To save him you would have to clear away the wreckage at some risk that it might fall on you. Again, you are under no obligation to try to save the person. But if you do, you have a choice: you can save him by amputating one of his arms or by moving the wreckage, thereby saving both arms. If you save only one arm, people are justified in blaming you for not saving both.

You may, if you choose, give money to charity, but you are under no obligation to do so. If you decide to give money to a charity that provides seeing eye dogs to blind people at a cost of several thousand dollars each, you can be blamed for not giving it to a charity that provides cataract operations that prevent blindness at a cost of only a few dollars each, as the latter would provide far more benefit per dollar than the former.

All these scenarios are analogous. They elicit moral intuitions about what is right and wrong, that is, what is morally required, forbidden or permissible. In each case doing something that you are not required to do and that can produce some good puts you in a situation in which you are morally required to choose the greater good. But you could, without blame, have chosen not to do anything. It is the last of the cases above that worried the professor. Faced with the prospect of blame for failure to give to the right charity, you might decide not to give any money at all! That is not an attractive outcome to someone affiliated with charities.

What’s wrong with this picture? Philosophy seeks to find logically coherent principles that describe certain broad aspects of reality, in this case morality. But in these examples the principles are not logically coherent. You can’t be blamed for not doing good, but you can be blamed for doing less good than you could. But doing no good is certainly doing less good than you could. So we have a contradiction: you can both be blameless and blameworthy for doing less good than you could.

When we are faced with a contradiction, it generally means there is a problem with one or more of the premises, so let’s have a look at them. The way to argue from intuitions about cases, according to McMahan, is that first you have an intuition about a particular case and then you generalize from that case to a universal rule.(1) Here is the argument in detail:

Premise 1: Doing act A will produce more good than failing to do it.

Premise 2: You are not required to do act A, but you are permitted to do it.

Conclusion 1: You are not required to do more good than less.

Premise 3: Act A entails two possible further acts, A1 and A2, which are mutually exclusive.

Premise 4: Doing A2 will produce more good than doing A1.

Premise 5: Having done (or at least started to do) A, you are required to do A2.

Conclusion 2: You are required to do more good than less.

So which premise is faulty? Not 1, 3 or 4, as these are simply facts about the situation, stipulated to be true for the sake of argument, not moral claims. It must be either premise 2 or premise 5, which are mutually contradictory. So it is either false (from premise 2) or true (from premise 5) that you are required to do more good than less. But which is it?

Here is where the shortcoming I referred to above is revealed. Much contemporary moral discourse assumes that there is a moral fact of the matter, a position known as “moral realism.” Moral realism is the doctrine that “ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world (that is, features independent of subjective opinion)….”(2) Indeed, in discussion McMahan averred that some actions, such as those in the scenarios above that produce the lesser good, are “objectively impermissible.” A second assumption is that such objective moral rules are logically coherent.

Taking the second assumption first, I suppose someone might argue that objective moral principles do not need to be logically coherent. If so, I reply, they could not provide a reliable guide to conduct, so we might as well ignore them. The practical effect of their being incoherent would be the same as if they do not exist. So we can safely assume that if there are objective moral principles, they are logically coherent.

The problem with moral realism is, of course, how to determine just what those objective moral features of the world are. The professor’s scenarios illustrate the difficulty. Is it true or false that one is required to do more good than less? How can we tell?

Typically, different flavors of moral realism posit different sources of morality and thus different methods of determining what the moral rules are. If you think that moral rules result from the decree of God, for instance, then you will refer to scripture and ecclesiastical authority to find out what they are. If you think that moral rules are simply objective features of the world without reference to their source, then you will rely on moral intuition. And the professor’s scenarios all rely on moral intuition.

But the moral intuitions contradict each other. One intuition has it that we are not required to do more good than less, and the other has it that we are. Could it be that moral intuitions are not a reliable way to find out what objective moral reality is? If so (absent divine decree) we have no way to find out!

No matter which way you look at it—that the moral principles contradict each other or the moral intuitions do—moral realism puts us in a quagmire of uncertainty. We have conflicting moral intuitions but are without a way to resolve the conflict.

Perhaps moral realism itself is the problem. Let’s suppose that the moral features of the universe are not objective, not independent of subjective opinion, and see where that supposition leads us. Well, if they are not objective, then what are they? We do, after all, have moral intuitions. What are they intuitions of?

They are indeed intuitions of moral rules, but the rules are socially constituted rather than independently existent in the way physical objects are. By “socially constituted” I mean that within a community of practice, a social group, a culture or a society everybody agrees (more or less) on what they are, everybody treats them the same way and everybody acts as if they are real. So, for members of such a community they are real. Their reality can be seen in their effects. People really would not blame you for staying out of the burning building, but they also really would blame you for saving the bird rather than the child once you are in there.

Unlike supposed objectively existent moral rules, however, there is no requirement for socially constituted rules to be logically consistent. People are not, by and large, logically consistent all the time, as evidenced by everyday observation and lots of social and psychological research.(3) Social conventions evolved as humans learned to live with each other in groups. They were not derived via logical inference from first principles.

Are they then as unreliable as incoherent objective principles would be? No, because, like most of human activity, they are context dependent. If you are outside the building, you are blameless for staying there. Once inside, however, you can be blamed for failing to save the child. Different contexts have different rules. Human psychology is full of such context-dependent heuristic rules. We would be in sorry shape if we had to reason out, step by step, everything we had to do. Those proto-humans who tried that approach did not become our ancestors.

From all this it appears that considering our moral intuitions as revealing a socially constructed morality makes more sense than as revealing an objective reality. (Of course they are both objective in the sense of being independent of any particular person’s subjective opinion; but socially constructed morality may vary from culture to culture, whereas on the moral realist view morality does not vary.)

The proponents of moral realism can object to this conclusion by claiming that a premise has been overlooked: You are permitted to do less good than more if doing more would entail some considerable risk or cost to you; otherwise you must do more good. When you are outside the building, it would clearly be more risky to enter the building than not. But once inside, neither alternative is more risky than the other. The original risk, having now been taken, is what economists call a sunk cost,(4) and rationally should play no further role in decision-making.(5)

This move weakens the case against moral realism, but does not defeat it. In order to make sense of the conflicting intuitions, the moral realist has to pile on additional premises, making the structure more and more complex. The scenarios above are not the only ones in which moral intuitions conflict. Should you tell the Nazis that Jews are hidden in your house or lie and say they aren’t? Should you allow abortion in order to protect a woman’s personal integrity or force her to have an unwanted baby to protect the fetus’ right to life? What about intuitions that Those People are evil and disgusting and should be exterminated and Our People are good and honorable and should dominate the earth? Depending on which group you are in, you may agree or disagree rather strongly. In each case, in order to make a coherent set of moral rules, you have to add more and more conditions, clauses and stipulations until the whole thing becomes unwieldy. You don’t have to do that if you take morality to be socially constructed; you just accept the inconsistencies because human beings are inconsistent creatures.

But in either case, whether you are a moral realist or not, you need to decide whether you will obey the moral rules revealed in your intuitions. How to decide that is a topic for another time.

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Notes

(1) McMahan, “Moral Intuition,” p. 110. There is more to the process than this. In further steps you judge how well the universal rule fits with other such rules, go back and forth between the universal system and particular intuitions, and so forth. Here I simplify for the sake of argument.

(2) Wikipedia, “Moral realism.”

(3) See, for instance, the work of Jonathan Haidt and Daniel Kahneman, among others.

(4) Wikipedia, “Sunk costs.”

(5) Thanks to Professor David Sosa for making this point in the discussion.

References

Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012.